


Like a Coward

by Quentanilien



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 09:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1739615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quentanilien/pseuds/Quentanilien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy's never realized how much he needs Clarke until she's gone. As the hundred prepare for a Grounder attack, he struggles to keep them—and himself—together without her. Post-1x11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Coward

**Author's Note:**

> This is essentially my Bellarke-centric, very angsty, wildly non-canon version of episode 12. It's in no way what I expect to actually happen on the show. (Except I'm fairly certain that the mountain men took Monty, Clarke's caught in a Grounder trap, and Finn's still alive, so I guess this might turn out to be at least a little canon.)

Bellamy finds Monty’s radio on the ground. There’s no sign of Monty. He can only assume the Grounders took him too. 

Back at camp, the news spreads faster than that damn hemorrhagic fever, sending everyone into a state of panic. It takes everything Bellamy’s got in him to calm them down—every ounce of intimidation, charisma, bravado, and a few well-placed punches here and there. By the time he gets them all back on task again, he’s exhausted. What he wouldn’t give for even fifteen minutes of sleep, not that he could sleep at a time like this. He wishes, fruitlessly, that he’d spent the time he wasted hooking up with Raven taking a nap instead. No point to wishing that, though. His night is just beginning. 

Jasper managed to finish the gunpowder recipe before they got back without Monty, and not a moment too soon. Bellamy was afraid he’d be distracted by the news, intent on setting off into the night on a useless search for his missing best friend. He was wrong, though. He breaks the news as gently as he can, watching Jasper’s expression fall from triumph to dismay, arms full of cans of his homemade gunpowder. The dismay turns to anger quickly enough, and he nods shortly, thanking Bellamy for telling him and continuing about his task. Bellamy turns to watch him go. The kid’s made of tougher stuff than he’s ever given him credit for. He’s in pain, that much is obvious, but he’s not going to run off and do anything reckless, leaving the rest of the hundred in danger. It’s the most Bellamy can hope for. They can’t afford to lose a single person right now. 

He’s on his way to check on Octavia in the dropship when he notices Raven trying to push her way out the gate, gun in one hand. Should've seen that coming. That one’s all fire, all action, and little thought. He knows this, because it’s like looking in a mirror. Lately, responsibility has been tempering his impulsiveness, though, and he’s going to have to use it to temper hers. 

Bellamy hooks an arm around her waist, dragging her away from the two sentries she’s struggling with. He’s rewarded with a sharp kick to the shin and an elbow to the stomach, but he manages to retain a grip on her arm. 

“Raven,” he says, struggling to keep his voice even. “Calm down.” 

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she pants, trying to wrench her arm away. “Finn’s still out there! Clarke and Monty too. I have to do something.” 

Bellamy curls his fingers tighter around her arm. “Exactly. We need you here, we need more bullets, or we’re all going to die.” 

She slams her other fist into his stomach, hard, and he bends over gasping, trying to regain his breath, his grip on her arm loosening just enough for her to slip free. But she doesn’t take off immediately, staying to argue instead. “I can’t just leave them!” Her voice is nearly hysterical. “They’re not dead! The Grounders took them for a reason. If they wanted to kill them, they would’ve left them shot full of arrows like Myles. Don’t you even care what happens to them?” Her tone is ragged, accusing, ripping through him like a knife. 

Of course he cares, but he hasn’t felt this helpless to save someone since Octavia was caught on the Ark. When they found Myles, his instincts were screaming at him to keep looking for Clarke, keep looking for all of them, but his rational side drew him back to camp, telling him the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It doesn’t matter what he feels, his job is to keep the hundred safe. 

“What I care about doesn’t matter,” he says brusquely. No time to be sensitive now. “Just stop and think for a second, Raven. Monty’s gone, you’re our best engineer. If you go off in those woods alone, the only thing you’ll be doing is giving the Grounders one more hostage.” She stills, looking at him thoughtfully, considering his words. He presses his advantage while he has it. “The best thing you can do for Finn right now is stay here, keep yourself and the rest of the hundred safe. That’s what he would want.” 

Raven’s eyes turn cold, and she moves her gun to her left hand so she can poke her right index finger hard into his chest. “Don’t you dare tell me what Finn wants.” For a few seconds, she glares at him like she could kill him where he stands. Then a pained expression crosses her face, and she bites out, “Fine. But I’m out of here at the first hint of daylight, and you won’t stop me then.” 

She stomps off to find Jasper, and Bellamy breathes a small sigh of relief. If the Grounders attack tonight, she won’t be able to leave at dawn anyway. 

He continues on to his previous destination, stepping into the dropship to see Octavia struggling to stitch one of Myles’ arrow wounds shut. She spares him a tiny glance, intent on her work, but Bellamy can see her hands shaking. “How’s it going out there?” she asks, false bravado holding her voice steady. 

“Not great,” Bellamy says honestly. “They’re holding it together for now.” His eyes land on Myles’ face. The kid’s white as a sheet and the tiny up-and-down movement of his chest is barely perceptible. “How’s it going in here, O?” he asks gently. 

She finally turns to face him, and he sees the desperation in her eyes. “I’m trying my best, but I don’t—I’ve never done this before.” Her free hand curls around the edge of the table, knuckles white with tension. “He passed out a little while ago, I doused everything with moonshine, I was so scared to take the arrow out but I didn’t know what else to do….” 

Bellamy covers her hand with his, squeezing it reassuringly. “Just keep it up, O. You’re doing the best you can.” 

She nods briefly, turning back to her stitching. Bellamy starts to leave but stops at the tremulous sound of her voice. “Bell, I need Clarke. We need Clarke.” Her eyes never leave the path of her needle. 

Bellamy’s jaw clenches and he stares helplessly at his sister.  _Tell me something I don’t know_ , his unhelpful brain supplies. “I know,” he says instead, clearing his throat immediately afterwards to hide the tremor in his own voice. He leaves the dropship then, because they both have jobs to do, and standing around wishing for Clarke isn’t going to get anything done. 

They’ve got sentries up all along the border of the wall, so Bellamy feels safe enough to take a gun and step outside, patrolling the woods just beyond the wall. He doesn’t know why he does it exactly. Maybe so he can see the Grounders coming sooner. Maybe just to get outside the walls, which should feel like a haven but instead make him feel like a wild animal trapped in a cage. Maybe just to get away from everyone and be alone with his thoughts for a few precious minutes. 

It's probably not the best idea he's ever had. Besides the danger, the farther outside the wall he gets, the more his instincts kick in again, and he wants nothing more than to take off into the trees to search for the missing. It’s not difficult to talk himself down,  _don’t be an idiot_  the constant mantra in his head, but it is difficult to take his mind off them completely. He’s worried about them. Hell, he might as well admit it to himself. What’s making the struggle that much harder is that Clarke is one of the missing. She’s the closest thing to a doctor they have; Octavia’s doing her best, but it’s not the same. If it comes to a battle, even if they win, they might all die of their wounds without Clarke to heal them. 

But it’s more than just that. He can admit it to himself, here in the quiet dark of the woods, if not anywhere else. He’d thought he could lead alone in the beginning, but he was wrong. So very, very wrong. He’s come to silently acknowledge that, looking to her for approval, opinions, dissent. Just looking to her, always, because he’s realized he can’t do it alone and he was stupid to try. Somewhere along the way, she’s become vital to him, a constant, reassuring presence, and he feels a little lost without her. He can’t let it show to the others, but he can’t pretend to himself that he didn’t turn his head helplessly when he saw Monty’s radio laying abandoned on the ground, searching for Clarke’s face in the dark, needing her reassurance, her support, before he remembered that she was gone. 

_Gone_ , not dead. Not because he can’t face facts, but because he knows Raven’s right. If the Grounders wanted Finn and Clarke dead, they would have killed them on the spot. Same goes for Monty. At the very least, they were alive when they were taken, and they wouldn’t have been taken alive if they didn’t need to  _keep_ them alive for some reason. 

A small rustle in the bushes brings Bellamy’s gun up immediately, and he’s backing towards the wall, trying to tamp down his fear, when a figure stumbles out from behind a tree, and the moonlight catches blonde hair. He would think he’s imagining things, but her familiar, husky voice breathes, “ _Bellamy_ ” like it’s a prayer. His heart clenches painfully at the sound, and he suddenly finds it difficult to breathe, realization dawning on him that the true extent of his attachment to Clarke runs deeper than he’s ever let himself admit. But there’s no time to think of that now, because she’s collapsing to the ground and he’s running towards her, not quick enough to catch her, but just in time to keep her head from slumping onto a rock. He cradles her head in his hands for a moment, meeting her eyes in the dark. She’s not unconscious, just dead on her feet. She has bruises on her face, dried blood on her hands, rips in her jacket. She looks like hell, but she’s  _alive_. 

He draws her up to a sitting position, letting her slump into his chest and wrapping his arms around her, burying his face in her hair. She smells like smoke and dirt and blood. She clutches feebly at his jacket, whispering, “Bellamy” again. He can’t imagine what she’s been through. He wants to ask about Finn and Monty, but he needs to get her inside the wall first. 

“Come on,” he says gently, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her up to her feet. But when he takes a step toward the wall, she leans backwards in silent protest. 

“Wait. I need to talk to you.” 

“We can talk inside,” he insists. 

“No, here,” she says, and her voice sounds stronger now, her usual assertive tone returning. Bellamy would argue further, but she winces suddenly, shifting her weight to one foot. He stares down at the ankle she’s favoring for a brief moment before picking her up and depositing her on a nearby tree stump. He crouches down in front of her. 

“Okay, Princess, I’m all ears.” 

She takes a deep breath, grimacing as she does it like that’s painful too, but she grits her teeth and forges ahead. “Okay, we don’t have much time, so you’re getting the shortened version and you need to listen to me.” 

It would be a waste of breath to point out that he always listens to her these days, so he just nods in assent. 

Her fingers clutch at his jacket. “Wait, Myles. Did you—is he—” 

Bellamy envelopes her hand with his own. “We found him. He’s hanging on.” 

Clarke nods once, and her eyes turn steely. “They shot him, knocked us out. Anya and a few others. They took us miles away. There was a little girl, she was dying. She was on the bridge when we blew it up.” Clarke’s eyes are huge, and they look haunted. “Anya said I had to save her or she’d kill Finn. I did everything I could, but—I couldn’t. They dragged Finn away, and they left me with just one guard, and I—I managed to escape.” She pauses, swallowing hard and looking at the ground instead of at Bellamy. He wonders, in an oddly detached way, if Spacewalker’s dead. “He said there wouldn’t be anyone left here to come back to, so I ran. I had to warn you.” Her eyes land on his, hard as steel again. “I left Finn behind.” 

There’s no trace of guilt in her voice, but he knows she’s feeling it all the same. His hand tightens on hers, still clutching his jacket. “You did what you had to do,” he says. 

“Didn’t matter anyway.” Her tone is bitter now. “I wasn’t even halfway back and I stepped in a trap, ended up hanging upside down from a tree. I thought for sure they were going to kill me then. They showed up, cut me down, then Anya appeared out of nowhere with Finn.” 

So Spacewalker’s still alive. Something else is terribly wrong then, or else her fingers wouldn’t be trembling so much under his hand. Her voice stays steady, though. “Then they explained what was going on. Bellamy, there’s something worse than Grounders out there. Something the Grounders are terrified of.” 

Bellamy’s eyebrows shoot up. “And they didn’t kill you because—” 

“They want our help. They said these…mountain men…have decimated them before, and our presence is drawing them out again. The bomb, the Exodus ship crashing.” 

“Mountain men,” Bellamy mutters. “Octavia mentioned them.” Just in passing. Apparently she’d heard about them from her Grounder, who hadn’t cared enough to elaborate beyond mentioning that they were pissed off. Too bad, because that would be really useful information to have right now. Bellamy suddenly remembers the Grounder’s journal, and the strange drawings in it, and he tries to suppress the shudder that runs through him. “Just when you think this planet can’t get any worse,” he adds grimly. 

“The Grounders want to call a truce,” Clarke forges ahead breathlessly. “They want to work together, they think we have enough time to figure that out before these mountain men show up. But they wouldn’t accept it just from me, after what happened at the bridge. It has to be both of us.” She eyes him warily, as if she’s afraid he’s going to object. He wants to, but he’s feeling trapped in a corner right now, so he doesn’t say anything. “I left them about a mile back. They didn’t want to get too close until everything’s official. And they still have Finn. A sort of hostage to ensure good will, I guess. They didn’t really bother explaining that part to me, or what happened to make them change their minds so fast.” They’re both silent for a few moments, regarding each other. “What do you think?” Clarke whispers. 

Bellamy sighs heavily. “I think it could be a trick. Or worse, it could be true, and the Grounders are nothing compared to the mountain men. In either case, we have limited ammo and limited resources, and we’re on our own. The Ark’s not coming down to save us.” Clarke doesn’t even flinch at the words, a testament to how much she’s been through tonight. Bellamy rubs a hand across his forehead, trying to smooth out the worry lines that feel permanently etched there. 

“Clarke, what did they do with Monty?” he asks wearily. 

Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Monty? Isn’t he here?” 

“No,” Bellamy says slowly. “We were out looking for you and he disappeared. We thought the Grounders took him.” 

“I don’t think so. He wasn’t with Anya. I would’ve seen him.” No sooner are the words out of her mouth, then realization dawns on both their faces, mirror reflections of each other, quickly replaced by horror. “They’re here already,” Clarke whispers. 

“Maybe,” Bellamy counters, trying to keep the rising panic at bay. But then he remembers something Raven said. “There was interference on the radios right before Monty disappeared. And earlier. Raven said Monty played back interference for her that he found on the Exodus ship log.” He doesn’t understand exactly what this means. He’s a soldier, not a mechanic, not an engineer. But he understands coincidences, and he knows chances are slim that this is one. 

His eyes lock with Clarke’s again, and silent understanding passes between them.  _That settles it, then._  “Bellamy, we need to hurry,” she says, and her voice is oddly calm, working its way under his skin and into his blood, soothing away the fear and replacing it with purpose. They don’t have room for fear, he and Clarke. 

Her hand is warm under his. He’d forgotten he’s still holding it. “The camp will be in an uproar if they see you without Monty and Finn. I have to put someone in charge before I leave.” 

Clarke smiles faintly. “Go on. I’m not going anywhere fast.” 

Bellamy gives her hand one last squeeze. He leaves her his gun, because he can’t stand the thought of her sitting there alone and vulnerable in the dark woods.

Too many eyes for comfort follow him as he makes his way through the gate. Too many anxious faces, looking to him for some sort of miraculous answer. He raises his voice so everyone can hear him, trying to distract them from the fact that he came back weaponless. "Eyes on the woods. Anyone leaves their post unmanned for a second, I'll throw you out there myself." Clarke would frown disapprovingly at his threat, but it works. There are a few murmurs and lots of uneasy shifting, but they obey without question. Bellamy spots Jasper and strides toward him, jerking his head to indicate that he should follow him into his tent. Once inside, he grabs one of the empty guns he keeps in the corner. Jasper stands awkwardly at the entrance, like he’s unsure exactly how he got in Bellamy’s tent.

“You got bullets on you?” Bellamy asks without preamble. Jasper nods. “Good, I need them.” He holds out an expectant hand.

Jasper reaches into his pocket without hesitation and dumps a handful into Bellamy’s palm. Raven’s been hard at work making them all night, filling all the empty casings from the expired gunpowder with Jasper’s new gunpowder recipe. They’ve tested them out, ascertained that they’re functional, distributed as many as they can evenly among the gunmen. He and Clarke may be going to make a truce, but Bellamy’s not about to walk into those woods unarmed.

“Bellamy, where’s your gun?” Jasper asks. His tone isn’t accusing, just concerned. Like Bellamy imagines a friend would sound, but he’s never really had a friend before so he doesn’t know for sure. He studies the kid for a second, taking in his haunted eyes, the determined set of his jaw, the few days’ growth of his patchy beard, and he realizes suddenly that _this_ is the one person he can trust with the truth.

Bellamy quickly loads the bullets before answering. “Clarke has it.”

He glances up to see a feeble ray of hope dawning across Jasper’s face. “She’s out there?”

Bellamy nods. “She’s alone, though.” Then, before he can think better of it, he clasps a hand on Jasper’s shoulder, meeting the other boy’s eyes squarely. “I’m sorry. We’ll find him when we can, okay?”

Jasper nods, and the dorky kid with goggles who stepped off the dropship is long gone. He’s been gone for a while, Bellamy’s just now realizing. He slings the loaded gun over his shoulder then levels a grave look at Jasper again. “Listen, I have to go back out there. There’s something Clarke and I have to do. We shouldn’t be gone long, but if we are—” Bellamy feels a muscle jump in his jaw, and he’s trying to rapidly calculate the many scenarios of what could go wrong. “—the wall needs to hold, okay, Jasper? No one leaves, no one comes in. That’s an order.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m leaving you in charge. You and Miller.”

Jasper looks a little doubtful. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”

“Probably not, but we don’t have a choice. They don’t need to know I’m gone. For all they know I’m patrolling just outside the wall. Don’t mention Clarke, keep everyone in line, keep them safe. That’s what I need you to do. Can you do it?”

Jasper swallows hard. “Where are you—”

“If I had time I’d explain, but right now you just need to trust me. I need to know, Jasper, can you do it?”

Jasper studies him for a second like he’s trying to read something in his face, and Bellamy knows he’s remembering the last time he asked Jasper to do something for him, when they both knew it was his last resort. This time is different; Jasper saw Bellamy walk back into camp, he knows he’s the first choice. A strange, confident calm finally passes over the other boy’s face, and he nods. “Yeah, I can do that.”

He’s turning to leave the tent when a sudden fear swells in Bellamy’s stomach. “Wait,” he says demandingly, then his voice softens a little. “Keep Octavia safe.” It’s not a question, it’s not a request, but it still sounds more vulnerable than he would like it to.

Jasper nods, hand clenching reflexively around his gun strap. “Always.”

Bellamy tracks down Miller on his way out, telling him most of what he told Jasper. He leaves out the part about Clarke and leaving the vicinity of camp, and he adds, “Keep an eye on Murphy while I’m out there. I don’t trust him.”

“You and me both,” Miller mutters darkly. “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.” He shifts his gun in his hands. “Be careful out there.”

Bellamy nods shortly, slinging his own gun off his shoulder and striding purposefully towards the gate, jaw clenching in determination. He’s clutching the gun a little too tightly. _I’m not afraid._ But the voice is not his own, it’s his mother’s. He wishes he could close his eyes, just for a second, but the weight of too many eyes is on him once again. He shoots glares left and right, and the gazes skitter away, back to the woods where their attention is supposed to be riveted.

The gate shuts behind him, and Bellamy allows himself half a second of weakness. His eyes flutter shut. _I’m not afraid._ But he is. He’s afraid to leave the hundred for even five minutes, afraid they won’t be able to keep themselves safe, afraid of whatever unnamed menace is lurking in the woods, afraid the Grounders are luring them with a truce to slaughter them. But he’s down to his last card, and now he has to play it, whatever the hell it brings.

Clarke’s still sitting on the stump where he left her, gun across her lap, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. He wants to yell at her for not staying on guard, for leaving herself vulnerable to attack, but she looks up when she hears him coming and all he can see is her pale, bruised face in the moonlight and how bone-weary she is, so he bites his tongue.

“Ready?” she asks, and it’s no more than a tired whisper.

Bellamy tries for a crooked smile, but it probably comes out more like a grimace. “No,” he says honestly. “But I’m going anyway. Up and at ’em, Princess.” He loops her gun strap around her back and curls an arm around her waist, drawing her up against his side, bending over a little so she can slip an arm over his shoulders. He knows she’s injured; she was favoring one ankle before and she limps now, leaning into him with every other step. He slows his own steps for her, tamping down his impatience. Fifty yards, a hundred yards. He feels her muscles tense up, the quiet little gasps she tries to hide each step she takes with her bad ankle.

Bellamy comes to a stop and twists his head to the side to look down at her. She uses his shoulders to push herself up straighter, pants a little, asks, “Why are we stopping?”

“This isn’t working, Princess.”

She sighs heavily. “It has to. We have to get there.”

He ducks down, disentangles himself from her arm, leaving her standing briefly without support. She sways unsteadily, and Bellamy shrugs his gun off his shoulder and presses it into her hands. Clarke looks at him warily. “Bellamy….”

He plasters a smirk onto his face. “Just trust me, Princess. I got this.” Before she can protest, he’s moved behind her, one hand around her waist and one behind her knees, and swooped her up into his arms. She gives a sharp little exhale of surprise and wraps her hands more tightly around the gun. It’s not an easy thing to carry a full-grown person a long distance, but Bellamy carried Spacewalker a good chunk of the way back from the Grounder’s cave while he was limp and unconscious. Carrying Clarke is nothing like that. Her body’s soft and warm, yielding against his in all the right places, and she’s light as a feather compared to Spacewalker. Her head droops a little, temple resting against his shoulder.

He gives her waist a small squeeze so she’ll look up at him. “Hey. I need you to stay alert. I’m pretty defenseless here right now.”

She lifts the gun slightly, emphasizing her hold on it. “Trust me. I got this.” Her lips twist into a tiny smile. Then her head tilts back, eyes searching his face. “You know, piggyback probably would’ve been easier.”

Bellamy twists to the side so they can fit through the narrow gap between two trees. “Easier? Maybe. I have a sister, I’ve read plenty of fairy tales. That’s no way to carry a princess.”

A soft, breathy chuckle is all she can manage, but he has a feeling that would’ve earned him a thwack to the chest if she didn’t have a gun in her hands. “Funny,” is all she says, but he knows they both desperately needed that brief bit of levity.

They’re silent for a while, no sound but Bellamy’s footsteps and an owl in the distance to punctuate the quiet. When Clarke finally speaks, her voice is heavy. “Bellamy.” Her temple is pressed into his shoulder again, and she’s looking down at the gun in her hands instead of at him. “I did something, to…to get away,” she whispers.

It doesn’t surprise him, but he hadn’t ever intended to ask her about it. Some burdens are too heavy to share. He knows that better than anyone. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. Whatever Clarke needed to do to keep herself breathing, it was the right thing to do.

“It does matter,” she says fiercely, and he looks down, startled at her change in tone. She’s staring up at him now, eyes wide and dark in the night, mouth set in a tight line. “He said there wouldn’t be anyone left to go home to. I stabbed him in the neck. I waited for him to bleed out. I held my hands over his mouth. I watched the life go out of his eyes. Then I ran.” She recites the list of her sins like they belong to someone else, in an oddly detached way, but her voice is ragged by the end. There’s a storm of guilt raging inside of her, although it can’t be seen by looking at her. But Bellamy knows, because there’s one raging inside of him too, constantly.

“You did what you had to do, Clarke. For us. To keep us alive.” His tone is tinged with sadness, because she’s lost a part of herself. He knows what that feels like, and he’d never wish it on anyone else. The bright, hopeful girl is gone, replaced by this world-weary, steely woman in his arms. He’s never seen her so broken and so strong at the same time, and in a strange, terrible way, it’s beautiful. _She’s_ beautiful.

“ _Bellamy_.” She’s breathing his name like a prayer again, like he’s her last hope on this earth, and she needs to stop doing that, because it tears into him every time, curling around his heart and seeping into his veins like he belongs to her, like she belongs there, in his blood, in his heart. He’s afraid again now, but the fear is different this time, and it’s her he’s afraid of, and he doesn’t know how to fight that kind of fear.

Her eyes never leave his face; he can feel the weight of them resting there, so he meets her gaze, because he knows that’s what she needs. “How do I—?” she asks, and it’s not a real question, but it’s the only question that matters.

The words spill out of his mouth without thought, hallucination-Jaha’s words, Bellamy’s own words, really. “Live. Breathe. Suffer.” Clarke’s eyes never waver from his, and she doesn’t so much as flinch. But it’s not right, Bellamy realizes. He’s got the order wrong. “ _Live_ ,” he says again, drawing out that tiny, all-important word, because that’s the one that means something. That’s the one that matters.

Clarke’s sigh is small, almost imperceptible, but the tension melts out of her face and she finally drops her gaze, tilting her head into his shoulder again at just the right angle so she can rest it there and keep alert to the woods around them at the same time.

“Almost there,” she whispers to the night, and Bellamy feels strangely empty of fear at the news. He doesn’t know what the rest of the night holds, this, the longest night of his life. It could end in his death, all of their deaths. But in this moment, he’s here now, with Clarke, and they’re suffering, and breathing, and living.

“ _Bellamy_.” There’s that tone again, the one that makes his fingers tighten on her waist like he doesn’t have control of them anymore, the one that compels his eyes down to linger on her face when he should be watching the trees, the one that constricts his chest and makes it difficult to breathe, the one that makes him want to not just live, but live _for_ something. “I’m glad you’re here with me.” She says that like a prayer too, and it’s enough.   

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this with the song "Coward" by Hayden Calnin on repeat, so, you know, go listen to it now if you never have before. :)


End file.
